The Lost Victoria Principal Interview (1975)

      In 1975, a book titled, "The First Time" was published by Karl and Anne Taylor Fleming; in it, they shared interviews they'd conducted with twenty-eight different celebrities, all about their first "intimate experiences." Among the celebrities interviewed were Jack Lemmon, Liberace, Debbie Reynolds, Joan Rivers, and, as you might have guessed, Victoria Principal.

     At this point in time, Victoria was mostly known for her roles in, "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean", starring Paul Newman, and "Earthquake", starring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner. It wouldn't be until a couple of years later that David Jacobs would create Dallas, and she would go all-in trying to get the role of Pamela Barnes Ewing.

     The main reason that I wanted to share this interview is that, as I've labeled it, this seems to be a lost interview. I've never really seen anyone talk about it, and I've never seen it quoted or mentioned outside of the original work. Additionally, because of how rare Victoria interviews are, I thought it would garner a lot of interest. Especially since most interviews with her tend to be rather surface level, while she goes into a lot of detail here regarding her parents, her time in high school, her early days as an actress, and, obviously, her first romantic relationships. I must say, though, that she gets a little bit spicy here, so I'll put an 18+ rating on this post 😂 I've retyped the interview exactly as it appeared in the book, and I'll be including scans of the original pages, along with some pictures of a young Victoria, which I hope you'll enjoy! Now, on to the main event!

Victoria Principal actress

Born January 3, 1950, Fukioka, Japan

 

     It looked like a spread out of Glamour Magazine: the lovely, single young woman in figure-flattering white T-shirt, tight orange pants and just a touch of mascara, showing off her newly decorated nest overhanging the Pacific ten miles north of Malibu, while in the kitchen chicken was frying and a homemade apple pie was baking. But when she sat down to talk, Victoria Principal was all candor and unblushing detail. Though her public relations man sat and monitored the entire interview, she never balked at a question or opted for delicate words. Neither did she try to sound brash and jazzy. It sounded like a familiar reminiscence that she had shared with a girlfriend or two, and a psychiatrist or two. For most of the day she anxiously awaited a phone call from her agent about an important movie part, and when it came, she flushed and grabbed a cigarette. The call was disappointing; there was no firm answer one way or the other. But she accepted it philosophically, and returned gracefully to the interview.

     Older guys like to receive head but they don’t like to give it. Even today, a man who’s in his thirties or forties will immediately go to bed with you but it will be weeks, maybe months, before he’ll consider giving you head. There’s still that strange backlog of feeling that the genital area’s something bad or unclean. I find that only younger men or men who’ve been married for a number of years can still indulge in intercourse during a woman’s period. The married men have learned that it’s fine. And the younger men, less stuck in preconceived male-female roles and more willing to talk about sex, have learned that it’s not only fine but that in many cases a woman is really at her most lustful the week preceding her period or the first few days after the initial flow, when it’s stopped being painful. Many times in the last few years I have found men, young and old, intimidated and unable to perform sexually at all. It’s much more common than it’s ever been. But I find that if I intimidate a man it’s a man who doesn’t make as much money as I do or who feels that I have experienced things, because of what I’m doing or who I’ve known, that he could never duplicate.

     I have always been involved with older men. By the time I was sixteen, I was dating men who were ten years my senior. My mother, whose ideas were sometimes a bit bizarre, preferred it that way because she felt an older man wouldn’t put as much pressure on me as a boy who was just learning about sex, which or course wasn’t true at all. I was going out with men who were much more sophisticated in their approach and to this day I can’t relate to a man my own age. I’d probably say to him, “How’s school?”  My mother also asked that these men be wealthy, which seemed like a kind of selling me out. I don’t know where she got it, but she always used to say, “You can fall in love with a rich man just as easily as with a poor man and if you only meet rich men it will be much easier.”

     The only man I ever lived with was a superstar entertainer. I can’t mention his name. He was 25 years older than I was and had been married a number of times. He had silver-gray hair. I was eighteen and had been living in New York for four months trying to be an actress. I always wanted to be an actress, I mean since the day I could walk or talk. At this point I was supporting myself by modeling and I was constantly pressured to put out, which turned me off, so I dated very little. I finally hit it as a commercial model, cosmetics not clothes, because although I was skinny I was only five feet six. I had to stay skinny to pay the rent, so I kept myself at 98 pounds by living on Tab and diet pills and I was sick all the time. To get the desired flat look I would tape my breasts down with ace bandages for hours on end and it finally hurt so bad I took shots to decrease the size of my bust. I was just obsessed with making it in my career and not giving in to the pressures and propositions that were handed out right and left. It really had become such a heavy thing with me that I was not, no matter what, going to bed with anybody who had anything to do with business. I was never going to get a part that way. I would hear stories about actresses who made it for a while and they’d say, “Oh, yeah, she was so-and-so’s girl.” And nobody was ever going to say that about me. Nobody was ever going to say that was how I got anything.

     I don’t remember ever being so exhausted in my life and I finally accepted a modeling assignment in Rome from a designer friend. We stopped on the way to see a friend of his who had a mansion in Switzerland. At this point I had no idea whose house it was, but I had my own bedroom and everything was kosher. The second night I was there my girl friend, who was also en route to Rome and who apparently was already involved with this man, introduced us. I disliked him instantly. But for the ten days I was there he pursued me relentlessly. Then he showed up in Rome and while still courting my girl friend kept after me. I was just repelled by him. He stood for a lot of things I didn’t believe in. He was very wealthy and I didn’t like the way he used it and I didn’t like his way of life. Although he didn’t flaunt it. Everything was too big, too broad.

     Well, he finally got me one night in a casino in Rome. I was being pressured from every direction to go to bed with somebody and was feeling a little like Joan of Arc. I was gambling and as I reached to pick up some chips I’d won, a hand reached and touched mine and, corny as it sounds, sparks flew. I looked at the hand, followed the arm and saw that it belonged to this detestable man and suddenly he didn’t look so detestable. Within the next two weeks he convinced me that my place in life was next to him. I went back to New York to get my things. An affair had begun by that time.

     No two people so unalike ever attempted to live together. Whatever he thought, I thought the reverse. His standards of morality were 180 degrees from mine. He’d fuck anything that walked; he lived for fucking and had no qualms about being unfaithful, which I couldn’t begin to cope with. That’s not the way it was supposed to be. And anyway I was used to being the one who broke things off. The first time he slept with another woman we’d been together only two weeks. By the end of our first year together he finally realized that I was on the level, that I hadn’t been around very much, and he became a very considerate, gentle, loving man. But he continued to sleep around. He tried to hide it at first, then he became very open, then he began to hide it again as he began to care more, then when he realized he was caring more he became twice as blatant, to more or less deny that he finally cared for a woman. He has said himself openly that he loved me, that he has never said that to another woman. He doesn’t trust women at all. He thinks we’re only out for money or some kind of personal gain; he thinks everyone can be bought and sold. In my youth and ignorance I thought I could turn him around. I didn’t want to be bought or sold. I wanted desperately to marry him, but he didn’t want to marry me or anyone else. I just adored him and anything I could do to make his life better or happy was all I wanted to do, that and be an actress. That had never left me, and I was studying all this time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He would say, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you. I’ll get you a movie.” And I’d say, “No, I’m going to study and I’m not just going to be an actress, I’m going to be great.”

     I was just obsessed with the man. I felt that I had run away from everything that I had ever known, from my parents, who were totally outraged, to live with this man, and I didn’t know how to break it off. It was a very abnormal and in some ways masochistic affair. I led a very closed-in life. When he was away I stayed home because he didn’t want me to see other men under any circumstances. And I had no women friends at all for fear he would try to fuck them. He tried to get me to participate in other things but to this day I can only relate in bed to one person at a time. It’s not that I have any moral hang-ups, it’s just that you have to find what you like and I know that being in bed with someone you want is the most marvelous thing in the world and if you’re giving yourself totally, then it’s great. But a three-way is a stage production. He pressured me, but it was not for me. I did not like being in bed with someone else; I only wanted to go to bed with him. I was not unfaithful—other men did not interest me.

     When I finally managed to leave, after three years and a nervous breakdown, I left everything he had ever given me except my clothing. Materially, no one could have been better to me. I had everything and anything I wanted and I learned how very rich and very unhappy I could be. I did not keep a single car, a single house, a single piece of furniture. The only jewelry I kept was the jewelry I had on when I left. It was my way of saying, “Whatever I gave you, you never bought.” As a result, to this day we’re still friends. I may be the only woman he respects.

     The sex was good right up until the day I left. In fact, when we’d see each other later there was always that temptation—at least you know what you’ve got there. He never made me feel ashamed. In fact, he taught me a great deal about my body. He was the first person I was ever open with about everything. He was a friend, a kind of lover-father, and the father-daughter thing made it all right for me to talk about things that I would never have talked about. He provided the father I never had.

     He was around, that’s the perfect word for my father, he was just around. He was a career Air Force sergeant and his world revolved around his work and my mother. It was as though I had one parent, because my father was not involved in my upbringing whatsoever. If a decision had to be made I knew she would make it. If something had to be told to me she would tell it. I think he spanked me twice that I can remember. They were married when she was a few days from being twenty-one and he was twenty-seven. As she was expected to be, she was a virgin until that day, while my father, being 100 per cent Italian and in the Air Force, took great pride in not being one. She was of English descent and had been raised in Georgia, and where my father was open and affectionate, she was extremely reserved both verbally and physically. But the sex education was her department; he never said one word. When I was about seven and she saw that I was discovering the differences between men and women, she sat me down on the bed and said, “I’m going to explain to you what this is all about,” which was very unusual for her. She didn’t go into graphics, into people getting together and procreating. I guess you could call it a synopsis and I remember getting my locations mixed up and saying, “Well, babies must smell terrible when they first come out.” Because of my mother’s great reserve, it’s hard for me to imagine my parents sexually. To this day she does not allow herself to be French kissed; she thinks that’s not a nice thing. But they appeared happy and insisted that it was one for one and that neither had ever been unfaithful. My parents are still happy. They hold hands when they watch TV.

     From the moment I could walk and talk and breathe I was obsessed with sex. From eight years old on, I spent every available moment thinking about sex. I was fifteen when Candy was published and I read it the second day it came out. The bizarre thing is that I never participated much because I had been so rigidly brought up to believe that you had to walk down the aisle wearing white and that you didn’t sleep with someone before marriage and because he would leave you and men forever after would not forgive you for having been in someone else’s bed.

     The first sexual thing I remember is when I was eight and we were living in London. I let a boy I kind of had a crush on see me in my slip. I thought that was very daring. At school the boys' and girls’ bathrooms were separated by a wall that stopped a foot from the ceiling. So by putting one foot on the john and propelling yourself upward you could peer down into the other bathroom. That was the first time I saw what a boy looked like, and I was absolutely amazed that he should just casually stand there holding it as he went about his business. It was so unlike my own, but I wasn’t shocked or repelled; I was fascinated. One day this little boy followed me to the bathroom, climbed up in the little space and said he’d like to see me with my dress off. I said that was a sin. He said, “I’ve seen other girls in their slips and nothing will happen and if you let me see you we’ll go steady.” Falling for the oldest male ploy in the book, I took off my dress and did a few turns. We went steady for months afterwards even though my mother made me give his bracelet back. He was the first boy to kiss me. We were transferred back to the States, to Puerto Rio, and the day the boat was leaving he came to say goodbye. I remember so vividly because I was sitting in the back of the car with my baby sister, who was asleep. And he said, “I want to kiss you.” And I said, “But she’s here,” meaning the baby. He said, “It’s okay.” And he kissed me on the lips. It was so romantic, but for years I lived in dread of the day my sister would learn how to talk and would tell on me.

     The next time I was kissed I was ten and was at a party at a friend’s house in Puerto Rico on the base where we all lived. My mother would only let me go if she knew the parents were going to be there. I remember calling her from this particular party and asking her if I could kiss someone on the lips. She said, “Well, if you must, go ahead.”

     Because we all lived on the base together and went to school together, sex was pretty rampant pretty early. For a while there I was hot stuff. I was the second girl in my class to get a bra—I was thirteen, just beginning junior high—and that was a big deal. Shortly thereafter, growth ceased for a couple of years and I really could have given the bra up, but there was no way I was going to relinquish my first visible sign of womanhood. The big thing then was to wear a straight skirt, a very collegiate Bobbie Brooks-type shirt tucked in with a thin little belt, and bebops, which is your saddle oxford in patent leather. Some girls were allowed to wear heels, but usually only to church. I remember getting in terrible trouble for wearing lipstick, so I used to put it on outside in the morning and wipe it off before I got home from school. My big claim to fame was that Glen Roy Milstead and I were the first couple to actually kiss on the lips when playing spin the bottle at parties. Because I was always willing to take a dare, to try anything first, and because I did very well in school and had skipped a grade, I was considered both a great swinger and a loner. What my schoolmates didn’t know is that while everyone else went way beyond kissing on the lips, that’s where I remained. We’d have outdoor parties with big bonfires and there was a lot of heavy petting and touching under blankets. Some couples were even sleeping together. But I absolutely would not allow a boy to touch me and for a while I regressed into a pattern where I wouldn’t kiss. I had become the vessel of my mother’s teaching and an object of ridicule among my friends. I was afraid to go against what I’d been taught. But it began to come out in strange ways. I began to smoke. I got drunk for the first time when I was thirteen. My parents were away from home and I had a tumbler of bourbon with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Was I sick. I didn’t get somewhat righted until I was fifteen and actually allowed to date, double dates only. My mother thought double-dating would inhibit any kind of sexual exploration, but it worked in the reverse. We’d double with a couple who’d been together for a year or two and they’d be doing things in the front seat we had no intention of doing, but we’d feel, “Well they’re doing it so why aren’t we?”

     And then I met Ron. He was much older. My parents knew nothing about him, but every Wednesday when I was supposed to be going to the library he’d pick me up at the corner and we’d go parking in the back of the base for an hour and he would teach me how to kiss. He never touched me. He just taught me with all different variations of what you could do with your mouth and your tongue. Then he would take me back, drop me off, and I would walk home. And during those six months when my parents thought I was in the library, boy, did I get an education.

     After kissing came touching. First we’d touch through the clothes. You’d let a boy hold your ribs and maybe his thumb would be touching the edge of your breast and you’d think, “Well, okay, tonight I’ll let him.” Then the next night his hand would go higher. When he reached your nipple you knew you had to make a decision. He’d either have to stop and start all over again at the ribs, or the next thing was to lift the shirt up and left him work through your bra.

     The first time I let someone touch my breast I was fifteen. We’d been to get what was called a Friendly’s Awful Awful milkshake and we were driving home along the main highway and he had his arm behind my back and his hand was on my ribs. And as his hand moved up I said, “This is it, this is the moment.” And when his hand finally touched my breast my heart beat so fast and it was just the most marvelous feeling I’ve ever experienced. Every day after that, when he’d drive me home from school his hand would creep, very slowly, from my hip to my ribs and finally to my breast. This was all outside the clothes and it never went any farther. He was a beautiful blond boy named John something, and we went together for two months. And nobody, nobody has ever made my heart beast as fast as that first day when his hand crawled up my ribs and touched my breast.

     When I was sixteen we moved to Massachusetts for a year and I met a boy named Tom Nevell. If anyone should have taken my virginity it should have been him. The first day I saw him he was walking down the hall at school and he had on a pair of white jeans and a navy blue shirt and I just saw his toosh. And I became a toosh freak from that day forth. I fell in love with that ass and I followed it to biology every day for two weeks and when it finally turned around the front looked just as good as the back. He was a rugged-looking sandy blond with green eyes and a lovely physique. It was love, for him too. Things progressed further with him than they had with anyone else, but there was still a lot of frustration. We’d go out in his red and white Chevy convertible and there was a lot of pressing up against one another and a lot of touching, even below the waist, but still all through the clothes. He just should have been the one. But there was still all that heavy stuff and pressure from home, coupled now with a new element of female jealousy. My body had really just happened the summer before, boom, it was all there. I loved it; I said, This is what I’ve been waiting for. It was all so new and I was all ready for flaunting it. So it was only natural for my mother to feel competitive. For years I said, “Mommy, will I ever have tits like yours?” Suddenly I not only had them but they were bigger.

     Tommy and I broke up and I went out with other boys but it went right back to just kissing. There was just one boy, a man really—he was twenty—and with him I experimented for the first time touching someone with his fly open. It was just a one-time experiment. It was something I was curious about and it was easier somehow to do it with someone like this, who I didn’t care that much about, than with someone I was in love with. There was some sort of process in my mind that I could do it without as much guilt and even if he didn’t like me for having done it, it didn’t matter because I didn’t like him that much.

     It was a month before my eighteenth birthday that I finally lost my virginity. We had moved to Florida and I was a senior in high school, but I was also modeling and doing commercials and entering beauty pageants—in fact that year I was Miss Miami in the Miss Universe thing—and doing whatever I thought would help me to be an actress. If that’s what it took I was going to do it. My mother didn’t mind pageants and stuff, because there was some glory in it and she thought she'd be right there to protect me. But I was beginning to make my break, beginning to be able to look at things and for the first time realize where she was right and where she was wrong. She felt me trying to break away, and though she’d say she had no qualms about it, it must have been a very painful time for her.

     So I was finally able to sleep with someone. I was walking down the steps at school one day and this beautiful blond boy, again, stepped out into the courtyard and the sun came out at that moment on his head and I remember stumbling down the steps and saying, “Who is that?” He didn’t know it, but he got laid right then and there. I just felt, unh, there was Adonis. That was the one, whether he wanted to go along with it or not. I was ready. I had been ready since Tommy but nobody had come along. He looked a little bit like Tommy in fact and, as I got to know him, reminded me in many ways of Tommy. Very handsome and just exceptionally bright. I didn’t know anything about him that first day I saw him. He could have been on the local garbage detail and he could have stayed there for the next ten years. It didn’t matter to me.

     He doesn’t know it, but that day I set about pursuing him. The next month was spent finding out everything I could about him: his family, where he lived, what he did in school, his grades, the girls he’d gone with, what he liked. And by the end of the month I was everything he’d ever wanted. I changed my hair and the way I dressed and joined a group because of him. By this time I knew his schedule cold and one day when I knew he’d be leaving a certain class I was standing right there. As he walked out I charged into him, practically knocked him over and dropped all my books. He picked them up and from that day forth he carried them. To this day he thinks he bumped into me.

     It took him a week to ask me out. We went to a football game, which I detested, and on the way he pulled out a quart of Coke and a quart of bourbon, which I had no inclination to drink. I had on a brand new outfit—the tightest white jeans I could find and a white jacket—and somehow he spilled the entire quart of bourbon on my pants. We stopped at a gas station and I washed them in the bathroom sink, but I couldn’t dry them and went to the game wet. On the way home we necked—no touching, no French-kissing. But when he kissed me I knew that the initial lustful look I had gotten was right on. This was the one. We’d been going together four or five months when the day finally arrived. We had worked up to it with a lot of parking. It was only the last two weeks before the big night that there was any clothing taken off. Up until then it had been lifting something up or pulling something down, but the clothing was still on. And we really touched very little below the waist. It’s amazing, but very little. And there was certainly no oral contact. That was not until a few years later in my sexual life. That was something, God knows, my mother had never told me about. I was under the impression that there was only one position.

     This particular night we were parked in his pale blue Chevrolet on some deserted road somewhere, and he thought we were going to fool around and then go home. I’m sure I caught him off guard. I remember him saying, “Are you sure?” I said, “For Godssakes, I’m sure.” I don’t remember what I was wearing; they all came off so fast. We were in the front seat. To have gotten in the back would have seemed too premeditated and I was still holding on to some vestige of propriety. It was very short and there was no particular pain or pleasure, no particular physical sensation. In fact, afterwards I thought, “Jesus, there’s got to be more than this. If not, I’m going back to the other stuff because petting was a lot of fun.” He was not a virgin but he’d only been to bed with a couple of other girls and he wasn’t very knowledgeable. He did take care of the contraceptives, which meant prophylactics. There was no way I could have gotten pills, I thought, without my parents finding out. I think I had an orgasm and that was important for me. It had been deeply ingrained that sex was basically for a man’s pleasure. But in fact, in the months following, my zeal far exceeded his; my curiosity was endless.

     The guilt that remained was only for my parents. My mother asked me one day if I was having an affair with this guy and I turned bright red and she knew and started to cry. I remember saying how sorry I was and thinking inside, almost watching myself, that I wasn’t very sorry at all. We were doing it now every available moment, on the way to school, during lunch, in the park. The first motel we stayed at was off Highway One in Homestead, Florida. We’d planned it. We took the whole day off from school and carried luggage and wore wedding rings I’d bought at Woolworth’s. We had our own eight-dollar cottage with kitchenette so I cooked to make it feel homey. That became our favorite, that and the Holiday Inn where we spent our graduation night.

     The sex got a lot better. The first and only time I had an orgasm with him was about three months after we’d started. Only after it happened did I know the difference. I couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t have another, but I got a great deal of delight out of the activity anyway. We talked about sex fairly openly and he became very worldly about my time of the month. We decided to get married when we finished school. He wanted to go to college and wanted me to set aside acting in order to work and put him through school. Some days I thought that would work; other days I knew it wouldn’t. I guess I was in love with him, but not like your first one, not like Tommy. When a man takes your virginity it makes him very special, but marriage was not going to work. And as I said, my sex drive was much stronger than his and that worried me a great deal. He more than once said I made extreme and unusual demands on his energy and more than once insinuated I hadn’t been a virgin. All I could say was, well, I tried it and I liked it, but I was filled with terrible doubts and guilts. I thought that maybe I was a latent nymphomaniac.

     Luckily the next man I had a brief affair with had a marvelous enthusiasm for sex that was absolutely contagious. Whereas my original lover had many hangs-ups and guilts and reservations, this man—he was twenty-seven—was so natural and encouraging. In fact, the relationship was based on pure chemistry. It was just like finding your perfect tennis partner. He knew all about oral sex but there wasn’t much of it. We took absolute delight in just pure fucking. I’m very grateful to him.

     Then I moved to New York and within a few months began my tortured three-year affair. Since him, no one has ever paid a bill of mine or paid my rent or bought my clothes. Since him, marriage has never seemed very important to me. When I left him in London I came to Hollywood and it was like finding out what it was like to be single again. The first date I had in Los Angeles I went to bed with the guy. It was the healthiest thing that could have happened, because I needed to know I was desirable, just purely “I’m a person and I want you.” And he was very kind and was actually not a bad first choice. For the next six months I went to every party I was invited to, I went out with every handsome available bachelor. Some I slept with, some I didn't I was a real party girl and I was treated just the way I deserved to be treated. What I thought of myself was the way I was treated, and at that point I wasn’t sure what to think. I knew that a man whom I had loved very deeply for three years had treated me like an employee, and if he thought that about me how could anyone good love me? I must be a bad girl. So I set out to prove what a bad girl I could be and yet at the same time what a good girl I really was. Finally I got with a very good psychiatrist and went into very heavy analysis, and he turned around my life and helped me come to terms with all those deep-down guilts. In my first affair the man had been rather laid back about sex, and in my three-year affair the man had been totally promiscuous, so there was a feeling that I wasn’t a very good person and that the only men who could love me must be bad. I fell in love with another big blond Adonis, a sports hero, and that was another disaster. His problems and my problems just didn’t mesh. The sex was very confusing. But the analysis saved me. I seldom go to parties anymore unless I really want to; I seldom find myself out with people wondering what am I doing there. I don’t feel obsessed anymore about being with a man. In fact, I haven’t been involved with a man for months. I see a few people casually, but that’s it. Now there is just an eagerness to enjoy life. Now there is a feeling that I don’t have to pay myself back for anything. I’m not a bad girl.

     Well, that's the end of the interview, everyone; I hope y'all enjoyed it! Now, before the scans, I'll throw in a few more pictures of Victoria (I'm sure there won't be any complaints 😂)

The Scans: